2014: The Year of the Obamacare Lawsuit (Again)

2014: The Year of the Obamacare Lawsuit (Again)

2014: The Year of the Obamacare Lawsuit (Again)

I'm just a little late to part of this story, but if you haven't paid attention to the latest legal challenges to Obamacare, or to the laws working their way through Republican-run states this year, treat yourself.

After the piece ran, Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler, who have come up with the intellectual reasoning for the lawsuits to block subsidies, emailed me to explain themselves further. Adler:

It’s not hard to find health law experts who believe we’re right, it’s just hard to find those a) support the law and are willing to go on the record with their views of the suit, or b) support the law and don’t contradict themselves (as Jost has in his series of arguments against us – having made arguments before that. (See, e.g., here.) I’ve been at quite a few academic conferences where liberal health law folks have told me that they’re afraid we’re right, but would rather not say.

There are four separate lawsuits in four separate courts. The federal government filed motions to dismiss in three of them – and lost all three (even though many of the folks now saying the suits had no chance had claimed the suits would be dismissed for lack of standing). If you want health law experts who aren’t full time defenders-of-ObamaCare-at-any-cost – and thus might give you an independent assessment of the merits of our argument -- they’re easy to find. Here are four (who, incidentally, have varying views about the policy merits of the law): Anup Malani (Chicago), David Hyman (Illinois), Nicholas Bagley (Michigan), and James Blumstein (Vanderbilt).